Goldberg and Guthrie

Friday, December 10, 2004

Militant Grammarians of...Shaker Heights

But, they were playing the Cavs, a team of erstwhile fandom of mine (I'm not sure that dependent clause is grammatically correct--in fact, I'm not even sure it's dependent, but I'm sure my mom can clear that up for all of us in comments), and the Cavs have this LeBron character, so I figured it was worth taking the free ticket and going.

Well, my mom did email me to correct me. It turns out the clause is considered neither a dependent nor independent clause, but insteat instead is a "phrase in apposition."

M-W.com defines apposition as "a grammatical construction in which two usually adjacent nouns having the same referent stand in the same syntactical relation to the rest of a sentence (as the poet and Burns in "a biography of the poet Burns")." That definition doesn't seem to help, because my sentence doesn't use two nouns in that fashion.

In addition, she seems upset at the phrase "erstwhile fandom," which I used to mean that "I used to be a fan." She suggests the more correct phrases "erstwhile fan" or "erstwhile member of the team's fandom). Yeah, she's right, I guess.

CORRECTED FOR SPELLING. What kind of fucking moron has a spelling error in a post about grammar? ugh.